Scenes from a Revolution: The Birth of the New Hollywood
By Mark Harris
Canongate £20, 496 pages
FT bookshop price: £16

A hundred writers on cinema will be saying, “Damn! I wish I’d thought of this idea.” Author Mark Harris, a film journalist for Entertainment Weekly, has had a lightbulb moment. For Scenes From a Revolution, his first book, he takes a simple notion – to chronicle the gestation and birth of the five films that were Best Picture Oscar nominees in the same year – and succeeds in presenting 1967 as a turning point in Hollywood history.